I made this quilt six months ago for my husband’s birthday and keep forgetting to blog about it! It’s a lap-sized quilt rather than a full one so he can easily bring it from room to room and use it all over the house, particularly (right now, anyway) in the study, which is the site of most of his PhD work. His thesis is on an American modernist poet, Hart Crane, whose most famous work is an epic poem about the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn Bridge quilt

I made the centre panel in one of the V&A’s Digital Textile Design courses (the perks of being one of the supervisors is you get to do one too if there’s time!), with a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge that I found on Flickr (with Creative Commons licence, of course). The photo was printed on silk.

Centre panel printed on silk

The gray pieces of fabric on the front are scraps from a colleague who sews all her own clothes (only in gray), and the back is made entirely out of old trousers. I did the orange quilting by hand in perle cotton. I wasn’t sure it would look good with the grays, but it did, and now orange and gray is one of my favourite colour combinations.